In an age of increasing global trade, government subsidies have become a prominent way in which countries can support their vulnerable industries. Stephanie Rickard’s Spending to Win: Political Institutions, Economic Geography, and Government Subsidies focuses on this important category of government distribution, providing theoretical understanding and empirical evidence for why we see very different patterns in subsidies spending across democracies.

The main idea of Rickard’s book is that the impact of an electoral system on the distribution of government policies depends on the geographic distribution of that economic sector. The geography of people and the economy has been largely ignored in canonical theories of government distribution. Rickard explains that the absence of geography in these theories has led to conflicting theoretical expectations with regard to institutional effects and to similarly muddled empirical findings. One side of the literature expects plurality electoral systems to provide excess particularistic spending; the other side views proportional representation (PR) electoral systems as likely to aim benefits at narrow interests. Once geography is considered, the theoretical expectations of policy targeting become clear: proportional electoral systems are more likely to distribute subsidies to economic sectors spread throughout the national territory, whereas plurality systems are likely to target geographically concentrated sectors to get the most bang for their buck.

Spending to Win takes economic and electoral geography seriously in theoretical development, something that has been sorely lacking in most research in political economy. Although theoretical models must necessarily simplify their characterizations of the economy to advance tractable propositions, taking geography out of the equation has entailed costs to our understanding of politics. As Rickard emphasizes, politics is nearly always a geographically-oriented game. This is true even in party-centered PR systems, in which parties strategically target resources to the districts where their party performs best to maximize their vote totals. Unlike in plurality systems, in which winning a district by large margins “wastes” votes, parties in PR systems can run up their totals in safe districts to pick up additional seats that cushion their margin in the national legislature. Rickard’s focus on the logic of geographic targeting in PR systems is particularly innovative and very welcome, because this is a very understudied area. Scholars tend to assume that incentives to target constituencies are absent in PR, but Rickard shows this is untrue both in theory and with strong empirical evidence drawn from party-centered Norway.

Rickard’s study adds value to a wide swath of literature in comparative political institutions, comparative political economy, and international political economy. The contribution in comparative institutions is particularly clear: her book can help us understand the distribution of benefits across electoral system types. Importantly, Spending to Win also dives into the institutional details, pointing out that we should expect large variation in electoral systems depending not only on geography but also on whether those systems encourage a “personal vote” or a “party vote.” Its emphasis on geography also makes Rickard’s book a nice complement to recent scholarship on the geography of electoral systems, such as Jonathan Rodden’s Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (2019). With regard to comparative and international political economy, Spending to Win helps us understand how governments can continue to support the economy to their political advantage even as doing so has become harder with the expansion of global trade. Using new data, new measures, and meticulous interview research, Rickard shows us that geography is a crucial, and often forgotten, variable for understanding distributive politics.

As Rickard notes, taking geography seriously implies broader implications, beyond subsidies, for how racial, ethnic, or religious groups are treated depending on whether they are geographically concentrated or broadly distributed. Geography and the possibility of amplifying or dampening the voices of certain groups should be kept in mind in the evaluation of institutional effects and in our understanding of the adoption of political institutions. Although Rickard is very careful to discuss endogeneity with regard to institutional setup and economic geography, most of the countries in her sample are those in which the district design and the choice of electoral system predated the current configurations of population and party support. Thus, the endogeneity question is less important for her study than it might be for scholars in the developing world. An important question that emerges from her research is whether electoral institutions in late developers were adopted in response to economic geography and population distributions. Scholarship on legislative malapportionment and the effects of different district magnitudes within nations, such as that of Calvo and Murillo in the case of Argentina, may imply that economic geography has strongly shaped institutional choice in the developing world (see Ernesto Calvo and Maria Victoria Murillo, “Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market,” American Journal of Political Science 48 [4], 2004).

The developing world is the next frontier for Rickard’s research, providing both an environment in which governments intervene more explicitly to influence the economy and a more difficult data environment in which to study these patterns. With regard to economic geography, the early industrializing cases that Spending to Win focuses on are the most evenly distributed economies in the world. Robust welfare states—in many cases, the products of the incentives of PR electoral systems to target voters diffusely across geography—have evened out economic opportunity across the space of the nation. Developing nations, in contrast, have mostly highly concentrated economies with regard to geography and weak welfare states. Megacities dominate late developers, because they have built the industrial economy around maximizing returns to the commodity economy built on fertile land and trade routes. Surely late developers will show even more stark patterns of geographic targeting and more important institutional effects on subsidies.

The developing world also creates the possibility to tackle the endogeneity question head-on and to advance theory in institutional selection and in political economy along the way. The late twentieth century saw the emergence of democracies (and their institutional rules) alongside the industrialization of developing world economies. The changes in economic geography brought about by urbanization, migration, and industrial deepening certainly affected the political logic that Rickard lays out in her book. Following the historical development of economic geography, institutional selection, and political distribution in the developing world would broaden her already high-value contribution to the literature in comparative politics.